Polaris

FIVE

The warning had come just in time. It helped that everything in the place was flameresistant, so after the initial blast there was no fire. Nevertheless, it was a bad moment. The blast knocked us all off our feet. Hot debris rained down on us. A big piece of something hissed into the Long Pool, and a statue of Reuben Hammacker, one of Survey’s founding fathers, was decapitated.

Emergency vehicles arrived within minutes and began picking up the injured.

Other units showed up and sprayed water or chemicals on what remained of Proctor Union. A large cloud of steam formed overhead. I heard later that the Mazha was bundled into his skimmer and lifted away within seconds. We didn’t know what kind of condition he was in, but at that point no one was thinking much about him.

The building was demolished. A smoking ruin. My first thought was that there had to be ten or twenty dead. We staggered around in a kind of daze. Everyone was in shock. I’d twisted a knee at some point during the panic and collected a couple of burns. Nothing major, fortunately, but it hurt. Alex complained that his jacket was torn, something I really needed to hear. He seemed otherwise okay. When I got myself together I went looking for Windy. But the place was boiling with confusion, people wandering around screaming and crying, searching for friends, trying to figure out a way to get home, asking one another what had happened.

I couldn’t find her, although I found out later she was okay. Knocked down by the blast, but she came away with a few cuts and bruises and a broken ankle. One of the rescue workers corralled me and asked if I was all right and when I told her I was fine she insisted on looking in my eyes and the next thing I knew I was being loaded into a skimmer along with several others, and we were hauled off to a hospital.

They did an exam and told me everything was superficial, don’t worry, gave me some painkillers, and suggested I have someone come get me.

Alex had followed the emergency vehicle, and he came to my rescue. While he filled out the forms, I talked on the circuit with a trim, blond, impeccably dressed man who identified himself as an agent from the NIS. Wanted to ask about the explosion.

What did I recall? “Just the bang,” I said.

“You didn’t see anyone suspicious?” He was good. He operated in low key, and he seemed sympathetic.

“No.”

“Are you okay, Ms. Kolpath?”

“Just bumps and bruises,” I said.

“Good. Did you happen to notice whether anyone left early?”

What the hell. “We were all leaving a bit early.”

“I mean before the warning.”

“No,” I said. “I wouldn’t have noticed. I wasn’t really paying attention.”

Alex signed me out of the casualty ward. They insisted on putting me in a wheelchair, and helping me get to the pad, where I was loaded into the company skimmer.

“Assassination attempt?” I asked.

“That’s what they’re saying.”

“That’s pretty vicious,” I said. “They were prepared to take out all those people just to get him.”

“Don’t be too harsh on them. The guy needs killing.”

“But I don’t.”

“Look at it this way, Chase. It’s a major break for us.”

I must have stared at him. “Have you lost your mind, Alex?”

“Think about it a minute. Rainbow now owns the only surviving artifacts from the Polaris. Other than the ship itself.”

“Well, good for us.”

We lifted off the rooftop, turned west, and headed for my place. “I’ll take you home. Then, if you want, I’ll get us something to eat.”

It was late, well after midnight, but I suddenly realized I hadn’t had much dinner, and, in spite of everything, I was hungry. “That sounds good,” I said.

“Take the next couple of days. Stay off the knee until you’re feeling okay.”

“Thanks. I will.”

“You can conduct any business that comes up from your place.”

“You’re the world’s greatest boss.”

He smiled. “Kidding.”

We passed over Lake Accord. I saw a boat down there, lit up, having a party.

“All that security,” I said. “I wonder how they got the bomb past the guards.”

“They didn’t have to. Whoever did it planted it in the storage area. On the lower floor, under the auditorium. The media are saying they came in the back way.”

“They didn’t have the back sealed off?”

“Apparently not. They’d blocked off the stairways. You could get into the lower floor, but you couldn’t get up to the auditorium. As it turned out-”

“-It didn’t occur to anyone somebody might bomb the place?”

He fought back a yawn. “When’s the last time you heard of anybody bombing a building? With people in it?”

“Do we have any idea who’s responsible?”

“I’m sure they know. How many people in Andiquar want to kill the Mazha?”

We were approaching the far shore of the lake. He lapsed into silence. I’d taken one of the painkillers at the hospital, and a feeling of general euphoria was settling over me.

We started down.

“There were several bombs,” he said.

“Several?”

“Four, they think. Whoever did it was taking no chances on missing the Mazha.”

“Except that the police found out before the blast.”

“They got a call.”

“Damned lucky. If the things had gone off three minutes earlier-”

“They were planted directly under the exhibition area.”

“Isn’t this the second assassination attempt against him?”

“ Third. There’ve been three in the last six months.”

Ponzio sent flowers, his regrets, and best wishes for my speedy recovery. The message was handwritten, which, of course, is de rigueur on these occasions. He was happy to report that no one had been killed, although there were a few serious injuries.

At about the same time, Survey announced that the entire Polaris collection had been destroyed. Reduced to rubble. That wasn’t quite true, of course. Alex had the nine artifacts we’d purchased.

I got checked by my doctor, and the brace came off a couple of days later. The burns were gone by then, so I was feeling pretty good. Alex came by with dinner, and we talked a lot about crazy people with bombs, and how no doubt I could return to the office in the morning.

That evening, after Alex had left, I received a call from Windy. She was still hobbled, but she assured me she’d be fine, told me she’d heard I’d been carted off as well, and wondered how I was.

“Just a bent knee,” I said. “It’s okay.”

“Good. I hope you managed to salvage your purchases.”

“Yes. Fortunately, we got everything out.”

“Glad to hear it. Thank God something survived.” She looked genuinely relieved.

“It’s a major loss,” I said. “I hope when they catch these people they hang them up by their toes.” I knew that when they were caught we’d wipe their minds and reconstruct their personalities. I’ll confess I was never a fan of letting criminals off like that when they did horrendous stuff. The bombers, whoever they were, tried to kill the Mazha and had no compunctions about blowing up a lot of strangers because they were standing too close to the target. I was in favor of taking them up a few thousand meters and dropping them into the ocean. But, of course, that’s not civilized.

It seemed grossly unfair to respond to what they did by giving them a couple hundred and a fresh start. Which is what mind wipes amounted to.

“I understand completely, Chase.” Long pause, which told me this was about more than the state of my health. “I wonder if we might talk about the artifacts for a moment.”

“Of course,” I said. “The media are saying everything was destroyed.”

“Unfortunately, that’s correct.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

“Yes. It’s thrown a wrench into our plans.” She was in her office, behind a desk covered with folders, chips, books, and paper. A sweater had been laid across it. She was getting ready to go home. I was the last piece of business for the day. “Chase,” she said, “you understand that the situation has changed dramatically.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Survey would like to buy back the artifacts we sold Rainbow. To return your money. With a generous bonus.”

“Windy, I don’t really have authority to return them. They don’t belong to me.”

“Then I’ll talk to Alex.”

“That’s not what I mean. We’ve promised them to clients.”

She hesitated. “You know we were planning a Polaris exhibit. A full-scale model of the ship’s bridge. Avatars. People would be able to sit and talk with Tom Dunninger, or Maddy English, or whomever. We had the Urquhart holo, Last Man Standing. Some of the Nancy White programs. Actually, a lot of planning and preparation has gone into it.”

“And without a few artifacts, you don’t think it’ll work.”

“Exactly.”

“Windy, I doubt the artifacts would make all that much difference. But I’ll pass your request along to Alex. I’m pretty sure, though, he’ll feel compelled to decline. I think you’re underestimating the public. Set the exhibition up the right way, get your PR people on it, and it’ll do fine.”

I could see that she’d not expected anything more. She simply nodded. “I’m glad you’re feeling better, Chase,” she said, and blinked off.

And we had better not need any more favors from Survey.

Over the next few days, several of the Mazha’s countrymen living locally were rounded up and questioned, but no arrests were made. It was Andiquar’s worst criminal act in living memory. For the first time in my life, people were calling for a return to the death penalty. The public’s blood was up. We needed to send a message.

The Mazha’s government apologized and promised to send money to the victims and underwrite reconstruction of Proctor Union. I was surprised to receive a call from the Mazha himself, now safely back in his mountain retreat (or maybe not so safe).

He’d seen my name among the injured. Was I healing well? Would I recover completely?

It was an odd feeling, to sit there on my sofa, in my own living room, talking with the world’s most feared human being. “I wanted to apologize for the imbecility of the would-be assassins,” he said. “They lack a basic sense of decency.”

“Yes,” I said.

“We tried to be careful. But one can never be certain about the lengths to which these fanatics will go.”

“I know. You’re absolutely right, Excellency.”

“Be assured, Chase, that we know who is behind this, and we are in the process of seeing to it that they will harm no one else.”

“Yes. Good. I’ve no sympathy for them.”

“As you should not.” He was in a leather chair, wearing black slacks and a white pullover. A gold chain hung around his neck, and he wore a gold bracelet on his right wrist. He looked quite dashing. “But I’m pleased to discover that your injuries are superficial.”

“Thank you.”

“I was worried.”

It occurred to me I hadn’t inquired about him. “You look well, Highness. I assume you were not harmed?”

“No. Thank you. I came away untouched.” The wall behind him was filled with books. “I wanted to extend an invitation to you and to Alex to visit Korrim Mas as my guests. We have excellent accommodations, and I can assure you that you would find it an enthralling experience.”

Okay. I know what you’re thinking. That I was sitting there making nice with a guy who does mass executions and runs torture chambers. But he’d been polite to me, so I found it impossible to say what I really thought. I told him I appreciated the offer, but that I was soon to be married, and that I was unfortunately quite busy. I considered suggesting that, after the ceremony, my husband and I would be delighted to accept his kind offer, but it occurred to me he might say yes, by all means, let’s have both of you to my mountain retreat.

“May I ask whether the fortunate man is Alexander?”

“No,” I said. “My fiance is a person I’ve known for a long time.”

“Excellent.”

“He’s a good man.” Dumb.

“Well, Chase,” he said, “please accept my best wishes for a long and happy future. And congratulate the lucky groom for me.”

“I will. Thank you.”

“I’ll arrange to extend the invitation again, perhaps when life settles down a bit.”

Rainbow had some decisions to make. We’d taken orders from nine clients and come away with a total of nine artifacts. If that sounds like good planning, it wasn’t. Two, the command jacket and the glass, were reserved for the office. Of the remaining seven, Nancy White’s gold bracelet would go to Harold Estavez. Maddy’s blouse was headed for Marcia Cable, a longtime and valued client. And her jumpsuit was earmarked for Ida. Vlad Korinsky, a philosophy professor at Korchnoi University, would get the plaque, with its history of prior missions. Maddy’s etui and its assorted contents would go to Diane Gold. That left only Urquhart’s Bible and the vest to be divided among the four remaining aspirants.

“We have an obligation to keep our commitments,” I told Alex. “You have enough for everybody. Forget about keeping stuff ourselves.”

“I like the idea of having some of it in the office,” he said. “Reminds us what we’re about.”

“Of course it does. But that’s not the point.”

I could see he was not going to be moved. “There’s really no compelling reason to give it up, Chase. Everybody knows what happened. We have forty messages telling us our clients are glad we walked away okay. Nobody even knows, except a couple of people at Survey, that any of the artifacts survived.” He was sitting by the window, drinking something that reflected the sunlight. “So that’ll be the reason we have to disappoint a couple of them. They’ll get over it. Hell, they’ll appreciate the fact that we were almost killed trying to fill the order. We’ve already taken care of five of them. It seems to me it’s easy enough to assign the Bible and the vest, and call the two who are left to pass along our apologies. Couldn’t possibly have foreseen anything like this, terrible waste of excellent merchandise, thanks for your interest, sorry we couldn’t oblige, maybe next time, et cetera.”

“And what happens the next time they call the office and see Maddy’s jacket framed on the wall? Or the glass?”

“That’s simple enough. We’ll put them both out of visual range.”

“Isn’t that defeating the purpose of having them here?”

He cleared his throat. “We’re just determined to throw up roadblocks this morning, aren’t we?”

After we decided how the artifacts would be distributed, he made the calls himself to the two who weren’t getting anything. I’ll give him that. I’ve worked for people who wouldn’t have hesitated to saddle the help with delivering the bad news.

He called from the living room, seated on his sofa, the view of the Melony behind him. (He traditionally did things that way. I called from the office; he called from the sofa.) And he was good. He described the carnage, how horrified he’d been, how unfortunate that so much had been lost. He phrased everything carefully and told the truth, more or less. (Because he knew that eventually the truth would come out.) He’d managed to rescue a handful of objects, but unfortunately not the one he’d earmarked for the client, blah, blah, blah. He hoped next time that we’d all be more fortunate.

And he would, of course, find a way to make it up.

It’s okay, Alex, both clients said. Not to worry. I know how these things can be.

Thanks for trying.

When he’d finished he flashed a satisfied smile at me. I told him I was embarrassed for him. That earned another grin, and he turned the pleasant task of notifying the successful aspirants over to me.

I called each, described the event, and showed the prizes to their new owners, the captain’s vest to a laughing Paul Calder, the plaque to a stoic but obviously delighted Vlad Korinsky.

The vest was accompanied by a mounted picture of Maddy wearing it. Calder raised a fist in triumph. He’d wanted to pilot interstellars, but he suffered from defective color vision and could never qualify. It’s a foolish requirement, actually, because corrective action can be taken, but the rules say your eyes have to meet the standards on their own.

Diane Gold beamed when I showed her the etui. We couldn’t have done better, she said. Gold was an architect, an extraordinarily beautiful woman, but one with whom I suspect no man would want to live. She gave a lot of directions, always knew a better way to get things done, and started wearing on you five minutes after she walked in. She was personally angry with the bombers, who might have destroyed her etui and, incidentally, could have killed me. “Death’s too good for them,” she said.

The Bible went to Soon Lee, a book collector and a wealthy widow who lived on Diamond Island. Marcia Cable wasn’t home when I called, but she got back to me, breathless, within the hour.

“You got a uniform blouse,” I told her. “Maddy’s.”

I thought she was going to collapse.

The most melancholy moment came when I showed Ida Patrick the jumpsuit.

She listened and swayed a little and asked what else had been in the exhibition.

“Glasses and books,” I said. “Flatware and jackets. There were two other jumpsuits.”

“Whose?” she asked.

“Urquhart’s and Mendoza’s.”

I could almost feel her physical presence in the room. The color drained from her face, and I thought for a moment she might be having a heart attack. “And they were destroyed in the bombing?”

“Yes.”

“Barbarians,” she hissed. “Don’t have enough common decency to do the assassination responsibly. I don’t know what the world’s coming to, Chase.”

In its own way, each of the artifacts was intriguing, and I enjoyed having a chance to spend time with them while preparing them for shipment to their new owners. The one that was most fascinating was Garth Urquhart’s Bible. It had gold trim, was wellworn, and it pages were filled with notes that were sometimes mournful and invariably incisive. Urquhart, whose public persona had suggested a relentlessly optimistic man, showed some doubts about where we were going. In Genesis, beside the passage, “Be ye fruitful, and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein,” he commented: We’ve done that. Resources soon will start to become scarce. But it’s okay. At the moment we have what we need. Our children, however, may be another matter.

That was a fairly bleak appraisal. But there was a degree of truth to it. Toxicon and Earth and a couple of other Confederate worlds were suffering from crowding.

I spent an hour or so with it, and, had I been able to keep one of the objects, that would have been my choice.

Some of his comments were sardonic. “I am going the way of all the earth,” from the Book of Joshua, was accompanied by his scrawled notation, As are we all.

“His family,” Alex said, “didn’t really want him to make the flight because they thought it was dangerous. Deep space, unknown country.”

“He should’ve listened.”

“Originally there were only to be two ships going to Delta Karpis. Then somebody at Survey, apparently Jess Taliaferro, the operations chief, got the idea of a VIP flight. Send out a few people who had made extraordinary contributions.

Recognize their accomplishments by providing the show of a lifetime.”

“It must have seemed like a good move at the time,” I said.

“They had people come in for the launch and make speeches. They even had a band.”

“How old was Urquhart?”

“In his sixties.” Still relatively young. “He had one son.”

In Ecclesiastes, “Be not righteous overmuch,” Urquhart had written, All things, even virtue, are best in moderation.

“He served two terms on the Council,” said Alex. “One of the best we had, apparently. But he was defeated in 1361. It seems he wanted people to stop having babies.”

I showed him the passage in Genesis.

Alex nodded. “I’m not surprised. He was concerned about unrestrained population growth. You don’t see it here, of course, but there are a lot of places that have serious problems. He grew up destitute in Klymor. His closest boyhood friend developed anemia and never really recovered, his mother died in childbirth when he was four, his father drank himself to death. Read his autobiography when you get a chance.”

And St. Luke: “Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee.” A caution to authors.

And politicians.

In the Book of Ruth, he’d marked her famous promise: Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge… Under the circumstances of his disappearance, an eerily appropriate line.

“He made a lot of enemies in his time,” Alex said. “He didn’t like special interests. He couldn’t be bought. And he apparently couldn’t be intimidated.”

“Sounds as if he should have been chief councillor.”

“He was too honest.”

I was still turning pages. “Here’s another one from St. Luke: ‘This night thy soul shall be required of thee.’ ” He’d underscored the passage but left no comment. I wondered precisely when he’d done that.

“One of his biographers,” said Alex, “quotes him as telling Taliaferro that having the opportunity to watch a sun get destroyed had forced him to think how different the scales were between human and cosmic activity. Given time, he’d said, who knew what Delta Kay might have produced?”